The New England Adventure

I’ve been in a bit of a posting slump recently, primarily because I’ve been busy and my RA position has a tendency to eat up the time that I formally used to blog. Still, I’ve had little adventures in the meantime and over my Fall Break (which is usually an oxymoron) Meem came out and her and SB and I went on a long-planned “New England Trip.”

Due to the relatively hectic nature of our lives – and also because we have no car – we haven’t really had a chance to get out of the Boston area much. Yes, we’d been fortunate enough to go down to Cape Cod, but other than that we hadn’t had much of a chance to see New England aside from when we drove in with Lillian. So, two of things which had remained on our “Boston Bucket List” were a trip to Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont and a weekend trip to Maine. From these two items we got the idea to do it during the Fall for the leaves, and from this we got the idea to extend it it to New Hampshire as well, and from there I decided to throw in Rhode Island and Connecticut because why not do all of New England? At some point in all the planning process Meem joined in because she was wanting to come out and see Salem anyways, so it all just sort of fell together into a whirlwind 6 day, 5 night jaunt through a decent clip of all the New England states (which as yet another reminder does not include New York). My Fall Break is technically only 2 days (M & T), but I was able to scrounge up enough time (and also skip some stuff, but 3LOL) to be gone the previous Th & F as well. Meem flew in on Wednesday night and I met her at Harvard Square after my glasses were over.

The next morning,Thursday, October 6th, with rental car in.. hand? we began our voyage and set out from Boston. This route map shows the path we took, with each number corresponding to where we stopped for the night (i.e. the numbers aren’t all the places we stopped to be tourists, only where our hotels were). The whole thing moves clockwise if it wasn’t obvious.

White River Junction, VT

Gorham, NH

Bar Harbor, ME

Portland, ME

Danvers, MA

So, you kind of get the gist of how things went down. Now, while I’d normally go through our trip in a journal-style approach (e.g. Alaska) I unfortunately don’t have the time nor gumption to do that for this blog post, plus I don’t have the full range of pictures at my disposal just yet. So, what I’ve decided to do is to approach things in a manner I’ve done in the past, which is to limit myself to a max 20 words per photo (below the photo as usual) and I’ve selected 80 photos from various points in our trip. The result: I cannot devote more than 1600 words to our New England Adventure. As a point of comparison, my average post is around 2,437 words (though I’ve already written 500 words anyways, haha). Of course even this approach will take a few hours to draft – because blogging is TIME CONSUMING, and I make NO MAHNIES from it.

Anyways, the challenge to that 20 word limitation is that I need to more succinctly tell the story, lest Tristen bite me for not mentioning his exploits. So, with the introduction out of the way, let’s get started!

The 2016 Meem, Taco, SB, and The Boys New England Adventure of Joyness and Ice Cream
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[INFORMATIVE PAUSE POINT: Ok so this is technically cheating, but mah authoritah. What follows is our visit to Danvers and Salem. If you have not, I strongly encourage you to read my Salem Post (or to re-read it) before continuing as it is much more in-depth than this post will be. While we visited most of the same places as last time, the addition of a car and more time (both highly useful) also allowed us to visit Sarah Osbourn‘s house, the Howard Street Cemetery (previously a field where Giles Corey was crushed to death), the Putnam House, the Putnam Burial Ground, Sarah Holten’s House, and also the Endecott Pear Tree (where a douche security guard chased us away) which isn’t related to the Witch Trials but it is still cool (and is even older). Not all of these things will be pictured below, but feel free to inquire if you want to know more about these places. As such, below is just a overview of some of our revisits and new-visits, constrained to the structure of this post.]

After leaving Cape Ann behind we headed down to Danvers, MA to start my 2 day “Witch Trials Tour.”

We also passed the ritzy and selective “The Bunghole” a true testament to Salem’s lasting historical legacy.

Of course no Salem trip would be complete without walking next to SB’s most favorite haunted house in the world.

Our “Witch Trials Tour,” and really the larger New England Adventure came to a close in Salem’s Burying Point.

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And that wraps us up, as from there we just headed back to the apartment, SB dropped off the car, and then we all got to bed decently early (for us, so not that early) since Meem had an early flight the next day, I had classes and RA work, and SB had a full work day. As with all of our adventures, it was a lot of fun and it was nice to have Meem with us (the boys highly approved of Grandma Meem’s accompaniment). We also got really lucky with the weather (only 1 rainy day!) and also in that the leaves were starting to really change right when we were on our trip. The year before the leaves had been mostly all dead/gone in a lot of areas, and in other areas hadn’t even changed yet. A lot of this stemmed from the drought New England has had this year, which while really bad for a lot of reasons, ended up being really good for us a “leaf-peepers” given the fact that we really only had one weekend to make this trip work. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed following along our route! I know I wasn’t super detailed by Taco standards, but I think there’s enough here to show you that you should probably take a Fall New England trip for yourself someday if you haven’t already, and this is especially true if you are a Stephen King Fan. 🙂

Also, I’ve been told I give much better Witch Trial tours than most, I accept beer and food as payment, just saying. 😛